Palin, and media, created space for Obama

By BEN SMITH

01/13/2011 08:44 AM EST

Sarah Palin, as Jonathan Martin writes in a very smart story today, provided Obama a useful counterpoint and a broad cultural space in which to operate, the kind of contrast that could well win him a second term. But it wasn't, I think, only Palin. The new media -- including this blog -- are usually well suited to covering the rolling, incremental, conversational story of politics, and most news, but the last few days weren't our best.

The explanatory reporting earlier this week in the Times and the Journal and POLITICO was much stronger than anything you could have found on a blog in the first 24 hours after the shooting. The new media headed down garden paths and gave oxygen to the sides of a shouting match that turned out to be based on very partial information. It was reasonable to explore the question of the political beliefs of a suspect in the shooting of a member of Congress. But by the time those explorations and course-corrections -- which are how the new media works at its best-- had lead pretty clearly to mental illness, the debate had already frozen into its dueling accusation and defensiveness that responded to every bit of incremental reporting as a point scored or lost.

Obama's address in Tucson wasn't, mostly, a media critique, but it was our false steps, as well as Palin's, that made the backdrop to a speech whose tone -- " a non-accusatory, genuinely civil, case for civility," -- drew near-universal praise.